Today's landing flap drive systems, comprise a central drive with a central shaft transmission to the drive stations. Apart from these, for reasons of redundancy, there are also solutions involving two shaft arrangements, wherein the flaps of the left-hand and the right-hand wing are mechanically coupled together. These are drive systems in which generation of the mechanical drive performance takes place so as to be locally separated from the power takeoff at the individual drive stations that are distributed along the wing.
In landing flap systems with a central drive arrangement, the drive motor is located in the fuselage of the aircraft. The mechanical drive output is fed by way of a central shaft arrangement to the actuators of the respective drive stations. The actuators are linear drives or rotary drives. Since the shaft arrangement, starting from the fuselage, has to be provided right up to the outer landing flap, structural leadthroughs, deflection gear arrangements and universal joints or cardan joints are necessary. The installation expense of the final assembly of such a system may be considerable.